‘Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko assured Americans in the 1987 film Wall Street. The slick financier spoke as a new American who rejected the social values of the 1960s and was shaped instead by the Reagan revolution. That new American thrilled to Ronald Reagan’s assertion that the nation succeeded when it “unleashed the energy and individual genius of man” and cheered his conclusion that “unnecessary and excessive growth of government” was at the root of the problems of the 1970s – the ailing economy, racial unrest and broken families. If only they were free from government interference, Reagan’s voters believed, they and their families would prosper again. As Reagan promised in his 1981 inaugural address, the country would “begin an era of national renewal”.

What many of his supporters could not see was that Reagan’s cheery individualism was the folksy and palatable face of an extremist political ideology designed to overturn the popular post-Second World War liberal consensus.

When the bottom dropped out of the economy during the Great Depression, Americans voted Franklin Delano Roosevelt into office and threw their weight behind the Democrats’ New Deal policies regulating business, protecting workers and promoting basic social welfare. Most Republicans recognised the dangers of an unregulated economy and abandoned their pro-business stance of the 1920s. When the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, he extended the New Deal with a series of policies he called the Middle Way. In the 1950s, business regulations, workers’ organisations, social welfare legislation and civil rights decisions placed the nation on a path to increasing prosperity. Americans rallied around the consensus shared by both parties that the government must play an active role in regulating the economy and promoting social welfare.

But big businessmen loathed business regulation and the taxes necessary to fund social welfare programmes. They carped that the liberal consensus was socialism. In 1951, William F Buckley Jr, an oilman’s son fresh out of Yale, suggested that the only way to combat the New Deal’s popularity was to fight the Enlightenment “superstition” that the honest examination of arguments based on factual evidence would advance society. The fact that Americans had chosen the socialism and secularism of the liberal consensus showed that people could not be trusted to choose wisely. Free market capitalism and Christianity must be accepted as the only starting points of political and economic policy: they were as immutable as the Ten Commandments.

Three years later, Buckley joined forces with his brother-in-law, L Brent Bozell, to portray a nation under siege by “liberals”, the vast majority of Americans who believed in the bipartisan liberal consensus. Buckley and Bozell vowed to destroy liberalism and create a new “orthodoxy” of strict Christianity and individualism. Despite the radical nature of a plan to overturn a proved and popular system of government, they called their movement conservatism. The following year, in his new magazine, National Review, Buckley vowed to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story”. The government must do nothing, he maintained, but protect lives, liberty and property. Movement conservatives’ plan to destroy New Deal policies gained little traction until the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional enabled them to harness racism to their cause. When Eisenhower mobilised the taxpayer-funded 101st Airborne to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, movement conservatives howled that government protection of black rights amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hard-working white men to lazy black people.

A white mob protests against the admission of the Little Rock Nine to Central High School in 1959. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Racism made an effective ally in movement conservatives’ fight against an active government. As the civil rights movement blossomed, Americans lionised the western cowboy, who, according to legend, worked hard and wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone.

Movement conservatism and the individualist western cowboy came together in Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona. Goldwater boasted that his wealthy grandfather had moved to the west for freedom from the federal government and he urged Americans to return to that idyllic past. He promised to roll back government activism, stopping business regulation, slashing taxes and returning power over civil rights to the states.

In 1968, the Republican candidate, Richard M Nixon, used the “southern strategy” to court those same southerners and movement conservatism moved into power in the Republican party and gained national cultural momentum. Nixon continued to use the movement’s demonisation of liberals to marshal support, expanding the list of people determined to bankrupt the government to include everyone participating in the era’s liberation movements. He championed hard-working, tax-paying, middle-class white men against “special interests” who demanded protective legislation that would suck tax dollars.

Modern cowboys flew Confederate flags, symbolising opposition to civil rights and the government that defended them

These tactics worked. In 1970, Time magazine made Nixon’s “Middle Americans” their “Man and Woman of the Year”. They loved America and Christianity and hated the taxes that gave their money to “angry minorities”, liberals, and women who demanded equal rights.

America’s modern cowboys flew Confederate flags, symbolising opposition to both civil rights and the activist government that defended them. Women, who had begun to take public roles in the 1960s and 1970s, found their roles increasingly circumscribed as the resurrected individualism redefined them as wives and mothers in traditional families headed by dominant men.

With Reagan, the principles of movement conservatism captured the White House. Reagan contrasted his own cowboy persona with the “welfare queen”, a black woman who drove a Cadillac and lived high on the hog thanks to government benefits she collected under “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 social security cards… and on four non-existing deceased husbands”. In office, Reagan slashed government regulations, taxes and social welfare legislation, explaining that the government activism that created the welfare queen was destroying America by killing individual initiative and morals.

Movement conservatives increasingly tarred labour activists, minorities and women calling for government regulations or social welfare legislation as lazy moochers. They defended women who acted in stereotypically traditional ways – stay-at-home moms or cover girls – but denigrated women who tried to participate in politics on terms equal to men. In 1984, when the Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, named New York representative Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, 60% of voters thought he had done so not because she was the best candidate, but to court women as a special interest.

By 1987, Gordon Gekko reigned. A hard-working man finally freed from the constraints of government regulation and taxation, he could take his rightful place as a leader. Movement conservatives designed their policies to help men like Gekko; wealth moved upward dramatically until by 2015, American families in the top 0.1% owned as much wealth as the families in the bottom 90%. Americans of colour, workers and women fell far behind their white male counterparts.

Increasingly, movement conservatives defended the rule of elite white men. They were makers, after all, standing against takers. Talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh demonised affirmative action, “feminazis” and the liberals who were undermining America. The welfare system, Limbaugh explained, must be immediately dismantled, for it was “shredding the social fabric”, bankrupting the country and “gutting the work ethic, educational performance and moral discipline of the poor”. In 2012, the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, claimed that 47% of the American people “are dependent upon government… believe that they are victims… believe the government has a responsibility to care for them…”

Dominated by movement conservatives, the Republican party advanced an increasingly cartoonish narrative divorced from what a member of George W Bush’s White House famously disparaged as “the reality-based community”.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump stripped off whatever genteel veneer remained on that narrative. He presented himself as a larger-than-life Gordon Gekko, a successful billionaire who had risen from almost nothing through his own hard work. He deliberately reinforced the idea that he – and by extension his supporters – was better than other Americans. He cultivated the support of white supremacists and boasted of sexually assaulting women. And yet he nodded to his own rhetorical sleight of hand: he lied shamelessly, boasting: “I love the uneducated.” To his supporters’ dismay, as soon as he was elected, Trump embraced the policies of movement conservatives, turning policy reins over to ideologue house speaker, Paul Ryan, who called for more tax cuts, the destruction of Obamacare and the shredding of the remnants of the social safety net, and to Vice President Mike Pence, who pushed a dramatic rollback of abortion women’s rights. But the triumph of movement conservatism has illuminated that it is hollow. Trump is Gordon Gekko on steroids, a man so convinced of his own superiority that he can abide no rival and yet who is clearly unprepared for the presidency. He focuses solely on dominance and power rather than competent governance.

Republican leaders are implicated, too. Their willingness to overlook Trump’s attacks on women and people of colour and to endorse his rich but flawed appointees has indicated that there is little daylight between their attitudes. Worse, that they are papering over the new president’s terrifyingly erratic behaviour illustrates that they will sacrifice the country for their own ends.

This moment has created a backlash. Americans are rejecting not just President Trump and his cronies but also the individualism that rode to power during the Reagan revolution. People of colour, women and younger Americans left few options by the current economic climate are leading the charge, demanding fact-based policies, government regulation of business and a basic social safety net. Those denigrated by that ideology are leading the way. The day after President Trump’s inauguration, women in “pussy hats”, an appropriation of Trump’s vile comments, launched the largest mass single-day demonstration in US history. Constituents are flooding officials’ offices with calls opposing the administrations’ appointees and policies, and on Twitter, Trump’s medium of choice, first National Park Service employees and now a host of rogue accounts are sharing silenced scientific facts about the nation. Americans are demanding the return of a nation marked by the Enlightenment values that gave us the New Deal: policies rooted in fact-based argument and the concept of social responsibility.

As Reagan said: “It’s morning again in America.” But this time, it really is.